The Question Concerning Technology
Clips
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0CS2lzD3LyU
Links
Japanese Artist Maps 1945-1998’s Nuclear Explosions
The Existential Pleasures of Engineering by Samuel C. Florman
Le Corbusier‘s book Towards a New Architecture
Fillipo Tommaso Marinetti’s text The Futurist Manifesto
Jimmy Carter’s 1981 Farewell Speech
Quotes
In May 1902 the fifty-year-old American Society of Civil Engineers held its annual convention in Washington, D.C. Robert Moore, the newly elected president, gave a welcoming address entitled, ‘The Engineer of the Twentieth Century.’ He began by eulogizing the engineers of the past for making human life ”not only longer, but richer and better worth living.” Then he acclaimed the achievements of his contemporaries and fellow members. Finally he warmed to his chosen topic, the engineer of the coming era:
‘And in the future, even more than in the present, will the secrets of power be in his keeping, and more and more will he be a leader and benefactor of men. That his place in the esteem of his fellows and of the world will keep pace with his growing capacity and widening achievement is as certain as that effect will follow cause.’
What a flush of pleasure they must have felt, those engineers of 1902, to hear themselves described as benefactors of mankind. What a quickening of the pulse there must have been as they listened to their leader predict success and glory for them in the years ahead. Doubtless they sat quietly, looking solemn in their starched collars and frock coats, the way we see them in faded photographs. But beneath those sedate facades they could not have helped but feel the stirrings of a fierce joy.
To be an engineer in 1902, or at any time between 1850 and 1950, was to be a participant in a great adventure, a leader in a great crusade. Technology, as everyone could see, was making miraculous advances, and, as a natural consequence, the prospects for mankind we re becoming increasingly bright. Every few months, it seemed, some new technological marvel was unveiled and greeted with wild public enthusiasm. There were marvels of transportation: trains, ocean liners, trolley cars, subways, automobiles, dirigibles, and airplanes; marvels of communication: telegraph, telephone, phonograph, movies, radio, and television; marvels of construction: bridges, tunnels, dams, and skyscrapers; miraculous new sources of power: steam engines, gasoline engines, diesel engines, electric dynamos; wondrous new materials: steel, petroleum, aluminum, rayon, and plastics; machinery to save labor and expand production-reapers, looms, presses, derricks, and lathes; and, of course, the innumerable conveniences of daily life that provided perhaps the biggest thrills of all-sewing machines, toilets, typewriters, bicycles, cameras, watches, electric lights, refrigerators, air conditioners, and so forth.
–Samuel C. Florman, 1976
We, writers, painters, sculptors, architects and passionate devotees of the hitherto untouched beauty of Paris, protest with all our strength, with all our indignation in the name of slighted French taste, against the erection. . . of this useless and monstrous Eiffel Tower. . . To bring our arguments home, imagine for a moment a giddy, ridiculous tower dominating Paris like a gigantic black smokestack, crushing under its barbaric bulk Notre Dame, the Tour Saint-Jacques, the Louvre, the Dome of les Invalides, the Arc de Triomphe, all of our humiliated monuments will disappear in this ghastly dream. And for twenty years. . . we shall see stretching like a blot of ink the hateful shadow of the hateful column of bolted sheet metal.
–in Le Temps, February 14, 1887
We want to sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and rashness.
The essential elements of our poetry will be courage, audacity and revolt.
Literature has up to now magnified pensive immobility, ecstasy and slumber. We want to exalt movements of aggression, feverish sleeplessness, the double march, the perilous leap, the slap and the blow with the fist.
We declare that the splendor of the world has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing automobile with its bonnet adorned with great tubes like serpents with explosive breath … a roaring motor car which seems to run on machine-gun fire, is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.
We want to sing the man at the wheel, the ideal axis of which crosses the earth, itself hurled along its orbit.
The poet must spend himself with warmth, glamour and prodigality to increase the enthusiastic fervor of the primordial elements.
Beauty exists only in struggle. There is no masterpiece that has not an aggressive character. Poetry must be a violent assault on the forces of the unknown, to force them to bow before man.
We are on the extreme promontory of the centuries! What is the use of looking behind at the moment when we must open the mysterious shutters of the impossible? Time and Space died yesterday. We are already living in the absolute, since we have already created eternal, omnipresent speed.
We want to glorify war — the only cure for the world — militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of the anarchists, the beautiful ideas which kill, and contempt for woman.
We want to demolish museums and libraries, fight morality, feminism and all opportunist and utilitarian cowardice.
–Fillipo Tommaso Marinetti, 1909
The more I researched the history of American know-how, the more I perceived that practically every technological advance had unexpected and unwanted side effects.
For all our apprehensions, we have no choice but to press ahead. We must do so, first, in the name of compassion. By turning our backs on technological change, we would be expressing our satisfaction with current world levels of hunger, disease, and privation.
We simply cannot stop while there are masses to feed and diseases to conquer, seas to explore and heavens to survey.
–Samuel C. Florman, 1976
Thus we shall never experience our relationship to the essence of technology so long as we merely conceive and push forward the technological, put up with it, or evade it. Everywhere we remain unfree and chained to technology, whether we passionately affirm or deny it.
But we are delivered over to it in the worst possible way when we regard it as something neutral; for this conception of it, to which today we particularly like to do homage, makes us utterly blind to the essence of technology.
We ask the question concerning technology when we ask what it is. Everyone knows the two statements that answer our question. One says: Technology is a means to an end. The other says: Technology is a human activity. The two definitions of technology belong together. For to posit ends and procure and utilize the means to them is a human activity.
The threat to man does not come in the first instance from the potentially lethal machines and apparatus of technology. The actual threat has already affected man in his essence. The rule of enframing threatens man with the possibility that it could be denied to him to enter a more original revealing and hence to experience the call of a more primal truth.
But might there not perhaps be a more primally granted revealing that could bring the saving power into its first shining-forth in the midst of the danger, a revealing that in the technological age rather conceals than shows itself?
There was a time when it was not technology alone that bore the name techne. Once that revealing that brings forth truth into the splendor of radiant appearing also was called techne. Once there was a time when the bringing-forth of the true into the beautiful was called techne. And the poiesis of the fine arts also was called techne.
Could it be that the fine arts are called to poetic revealing? Could it be that revealing lays claim to the arts most primally, so that they for their part may expressly foster the growth of the saving power, may awaken and found anew our look into that which grants and our trust in it?
Thus questioning, we bear witness to the crisis that in our sheer preoccupation with technology we do not yet experience the coming to presence of technology, that in our sheer aesthetic-mindedness we no longer guard and preserve the coming to presence of art. Yet the more questioningly we ponder the essence of technology, the more mysterious the essence of art becomes.
–Martin Heidegger, 1952
Nuclear weapons are an expression of one side of our human character, but there’s another side. The same rocket technology that delivers nuclear warheads has also taken us peacefully into space. From that perspective, we see our Earth as it really is – a small and fragile and beautiful blue globe, the only home we have.
–Jimmy Carter, January 14, 1981
Bonus Heidegger Material (for reference only)
The Question Concerning Technology (original essay)
(University of Hawaii Guide) to The Question Concerning Technology